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Ever since Gennaro Lombardi sold what’s reported to be New York’s—and America’s—first pie in 1905, our hometown pizza legacy has been inextricably linked with coal, the heating and baking fuel of the day. Other than burning hotter, coal offers little more than a nostalgic advantage (after all, it’s largely nostalgia that draws those long lines) over wood, which might seem to have surpassed its antecedent in these days of pizza-napoletana obsession. In fact, coal-fired pizza is on the upswing, thanks to new, gas-assisted oven models and cleaner-burning coal. Despite conventional wisdom that coal-fueled ovens have been outlawed, the DEP’s proposed revisions to air-pollution codes call these chambers “previously unregulated sources of particulate matter” and only require that new ones employ control technology. “I wanted to do something unique,” says Thomas Cucco, who installed a Wood Stone coal-fired oven at the year-and-a-half-old Table 87 in Brooklyn Heights, where he sells what he claims to be Brooklyn’s only coal-oven pizza by the slice. (He plans to open a second location in Gowanus in April.) In addition to the Founding Four (Lombardi’s, John’s, Patsy’s, and Totonno’s), which are all still going strong, here’s where to find today’s coal-oven pies.